Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

One of the most important decisions a student can make during the course of his or her college career is in what field to major. The major a student selects translates directly into the types of skills and knowledge he or she will obtain during college, and it can influence the type of career chosen after postsecondary education ends. In this project we estimate the causal effect of students’ college major choices on their postsecondary attainment and labor market outcomes using detailed administrative data from public universities in Texas linked to earnings records from unemployment insurance records. We start by establishing a baseline of comparison through the use of ordinary least squares regression models that control for a detailed set of student background characteristics, peer effects and institution specific effects. We then use a unique regression-discontinuity design for a subset of majors - specifically business, communications and biology (fields that account for 30% of bachelor degree seekers in the US) - that uses minimum GPA requirements for changing majors to identify causal impacts of these major fields.  OLS estimates show substantial variation in educational attainment differences and earnings premia across fields that are attenuated, but not eliminated, by controlling for key student characteristics and institution-cohort fixed-effects. Engineering, business, and economics maintain the highest earnings premia with arts and humanities holding the lowest. We also find that premia for technical fields are generally larger in flagship institutions than other four-year institutions. For our RD estimate, we find little evidence of earnings returns to business or biology, nor do we find consistent evidence of impacts on educational attainment, though we note that biology estimates are imprecise.  Only communications shows positive returns in the RD model.